Summary
Catherine's talk will cover what an advanced, mixed method team looks like when it covers a broad range of research disciplines (e.g. data, customer experience, market research, digital research etc.), as well as how to make this work for the business and keep pace with ever-changing consumer behaviors.
Key Insights
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Transforming a research team by focusing on how they work, not just what they do, can unlock strategic business value.
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Organizing research around tasks and business priorities rather than specialist silos accelerates creativity and impact.
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Using multi-discipline virtual teams enables effective use of a small, fixed headcount to meet broad challenges.
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Transparent and collaborative project allocation helps address staff concerns about workload and status changes.
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Coaching managers to develop their teams without micromanaging fosters leadership growth at all levels.
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Aligning research priorities with business goals and reframing stakeholder requests enhances relevance and efficiency.
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Adopting a triage decision tree empowers junior staff to respond swiftly to routine queries while escalating strategic ones.
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Introducing 'go-to' points or account managers for stakeholder groups helps maintain personal connections despite a flexible team structure.
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Careful planning and incremental communication are critical to easing transition fatigue and resistance in change programs.
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Multi-skilled teams improve job satisfaction, reduce turnover, and generate award-winning, innovative insights that shift business decisions.
Notable Quotes
"The big question was how do you achieve ambitious transformation with only nine people serving a division of 3,000."
"We spent 90% of our resource marking everyone's homework—tactical queries and performance reporting—rather than driving strategy."
"We threw the whole team structure aside and started commissioning work based on multiple skill sets at all levels."
"Budgets are allocated by project, not by specialism, allowing investment to match scale and scope of business questions."
"Project leadership can be allocated to the right discipline, not necessarily the most senior person."
"The emphasis of managers is coaching and development, not signing off or overseeing everything."
"The transition felt radical, moving from an overly reactive approach to a focused planning mindset."
"We created decision trees so junior team members can quickly decide what requests to handle and what to escalate."
"Stakeholders wanted a research team that did everything they asked, so we kind of did this transformation in spite of them."
"We now have the capability to tell the World Service what to do, rather than just tell them what the audience thinks."
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